[scribus-dev] Consolidating the term for 'curve'

[Gregory Pittman]

On 08/21/2014 08:19 AM, Kunda Loves Scribus wrote:
> Came across this issue: http://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=9120
>
> "For curve lines (curves) now several words are used: curve, path, 
> polyline and sometimes even may be outline and contour.
> Term "outline" used for: document scheme, text effect, font 
> conversion, may be some else, but that is enough to get confused.
> There are several tools that produce polylines. Quite confusing too 
> (though understandable).
> So problem is not really in translation, but in unification of these 
> terms."
>
>
Although there is a source of confusion with outline as it applies to 
text, and an outline of a frame or a glyph, I think the term is too 
entrenched for both meanings outside of Scribus to make some attempt at 
forbidding one usage or the other. Certainly there should be an effort 
to disambiguate when necessary -- text outline, manuscript outline, 
frame outline, glyph outline, for example. Text is not equivalent to 
glyph, of course.

A polyline is not a curved line. It is a single structure of short 
straight line segments (in other words, it is not a series of individual 
lines that happen to touch end-to-end). While a polygon will refer to an 
enclosed figure, a polyline may be open. In Scribus you can take a line 
or polyline and edit it to create curves, but this is not a very 
significant source of confusion.

Outline of a frame and contour of a frame are quite different. The 
contour line cannot be made visible. You're generally not even aware of 
it unless you use it for a text flow operation. Again, though, there are 
general semantic uses of contour outside of Scribus operations that 
we're not going to forbid.

The main thing we should consider is that when we write documentation, 
we should avoid the confusion that may arise when the terms are used 
without explanation.

Greg